Technological advances on the Internet now enable students to develop participation skills in virtual worlds. Similar to controlling a character in a video game, multi-user virtual environments, or MUVEs, allow participants to interact with others in synchronous, online settings. The authors of this study created a link between MUVEs and…

In interdisciplinary or intercultural groups, it is highly important that the members of the group are able to apply and share knowledge across the standard boundaries that exist around disciplines and practices. Often, a lot of effort is required to avoid pitfalls such as misunderstandings, judgemental discussions or just the inability to…

Findings are reported from a year-long evaluation of the effectiveness of the SPRinG programme relative to a control group. SPRinG aimed to address the wide gap between the potential of group interaction to promote learning and its limited use in schools. The project involved working with teachers to develop strategies for enhancing pupil group…

Student engagement has been shown to positively affect college students' experiences. Student engagement includes co-curricular and curricular activities designed to enrich and broaden the educational experience. Activities can include both in-class and out-of-class experiences. One way for students to become involved is through student…

As I approach my thoughts on faith and the adult learning I will concentrate my deliberations on faith, spirituality and dissonance, and the adult learner as reported in in-person dialogs selected from four studies (Shirk, 1990, 1998, 2005). Consideration will be given to the sociopsychological aspects of and the costs and benefits related to…

There is wide demand for engineering graduates to be capable of working well in teams. The engineering accreditation body (ABET, www.abet.org) has responded to this need by requiring engineering programs to demonstrate that their graduates have "an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams" (Haag, Froyd, Coleman, & Caso, n.d.),…

Longitudinal studies are necessary to examine individual change over time, with group status often being an important variable in explaining some individual differences in change. Although sample size planning for longitudinal studies has focused on statistical power, recent calls for effect sizes and their corresponding confidence intervals…

The idea that social relations can aggregate into social capital has intuitive appeal that scholars are finding useful as they seek to explain variations in community outcomes. This article suggests that it may be time for metropolitan university administrators to begin thinking beyond community relations or community engagement as they seek to…

More and more, the educators this author works with recognize that schools will need to become different, not just better, to help students meet the challenges of the future. These educators are trying to respond to an imperative to innovate as well as improve. The depth of change required to move from creating improvement to fostering innovation…

Having completed graduate degrees in educational research and counseling, I have studied the theory of focus groups and participated in many while in a classroom setting. Interestingly, I had never moderated one until my first attempt in a text-based online environment. This paper describes my preparation for the session as well as the issues I…

The developmental exchange is a central feature of social development, interpersonal dynamics, situated learning, and personal transformation. It is the enabling process in Guided Autobiography (GAB) settings that promotes the achievement of personal goals and group accomplishments. Nevertheless, these exchanges are embedded in the GAB structures…

Young children's leadership is an undertheorized and underresearched topic. Much of the research literature involves paired children working on adult-set tasks that are aimed to provide data on specific aspects of children's collaborative work. This article describes and discusses an investigation into children's leadership styles within…

This paper considers the "policy work" of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the "problem of meaning" and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get "enacted". It argues that "policy work" is made up of a set of complex and…

The analysis of the nature of youth extremism has shown that there is a connection between the extremist tendency ["ekstremal'nost'"] that is an essential property of young people, on the one hand, and extremist manifestations that come about in that community under certain conditions. These conditions include external ones (the…

Purpose: Based on showing the significance of embodied and relational learning, this paper aims for contributing to a more comprehensive and integral approach to learning in and of organizations and its underlying dynamics. Design/methodology/approach: Methodologically, advanced phenomenology and an integral framework are used for generating a…